Next Debate In Arab World: Terrorist Software

Other Views

November 24, 2001|By Thomas Friedman, the New York Times

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Over coffee the other day here in the Gulf, an Arab friend -- a sweet, thoughtful, liberal person -- confided to me something that was deeply troubling him: "My 11-year-old son thinks bin Laden is a good man."

For Americans, Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer. But for many young Arabs, bin Laden, even in defeat, is still Robin Hood. What attracts them to him is not his vision of the ideal Muslim society, which few would want to live in. No, what attracts them to him is his sheer defiance of everything young Arabs and Muslims detest -- their hypocritical rulers, Israel, U.S. dominance and their own economic backwardness. He is still the finger in the eye of the world that so many frustrated, powerless people out here would love to poke.

The reason it is important to eliminate bin Laden -- besides justice -- is the same reason it was critical to eliminate the Taliban:

As long as we're chasing him around, there will never be an honest debate among Muslims and Arabs about the future of their societies.

Think of all the nonsense written in the press -- particularly the European and Arab media -- about the concern for "civilian casualties" in Afghanistan. It turns out many of those Afghan "civilians" were praying for another dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not. Now that the Taliban are gone, Afghans can freely fight out, among themselves, the war of ideas for what sort of society they want.

My hope is that once bin Laden is eliminated, Arabs and Muslims will want to do the same. That is, instead of expressing rage with their repressive, corrupt rulers, or with U.S. policy, by rooting for bin Laden, they will start to raise their own voices. It's only when the Arab-Muslim world sheds the veil of bin Laden, as Afghans shed the Taliban, and faces the fact that 9-11 was primarily about anger and problems with their societies, not ours, will we eradicate not just the hardware of terrorism, but its software.

"We in the West can't have that debate for them, but we can help create the conditions for it to happen," remarked the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen. "America's role is to show the way to incremental change -- something that is not, presto, instant democracy or fantasies that enlightened despotism will serve our interests. We can't just go on looking at the Arab world as a giant gas station, indifferent to what happens inside. Because the gas is now leaking and all around people are throwing matches."

Every day I see signs that this war of ideas is possible: it's the Arab journalist who says to me angrily of the Arab world today, "We can't even make an aspirin for our own headache," or it's Ahmad al-Baghdadi, the Kuwaiti professor, who just published a remarkable essay in Kuwait's Al Anbaa and Egypt's Akhbar Al Youm entitled Sharon Is a Terrorist -- and You?

"[Ariel] Sharon was a terrorist from the very first moment of the . . . Zionist entity," wrote Baghdadi. But what about Arab-Muslim rulers?

"Persecuting intellectuals in the courtrooms [of Arab countries], trials [of intellectuals] for heresy, . . . all exist only in the Islamic world. Is this not terrorism? . . . Iraq alone is a never-ending story of terrorism of the state against its own citizens and neighbors. Isn't this terrorism? . . . The Palestinian Arabs were the first to invent airplane hijacking and the scaring of passengers. Isn't this terrorism? Arab Muslims have no rivals in this; they are the masters of terrorism toward their citizens, and sometimes their terrorism also reaches the innocent people of the world, with the support of some of the clerics. . . . [Ours] is a nation whose ignorance makes the nations of the world laugh! The Islamic world and the Arab world are the only [places] in which intellectuals -- whose only crime was to write -- rot in prison. The Arabs and Muslims claim that their religion is a religion of tolerance, but they show no tolerance for those who oppose their opinions. . . . Now the time has come to pay the price . . . and the account is long -- longer than all the beards of the Taliban gang together. The West's message to the Arab and Muslim world is clear: mend your ways or else" (translation by MEMRI).

We must fight the ground war to get bin Laden and his hardware. But Arabs and Muslims must fight the war of ideas to uproot his software.